Hearing the Voice is a large interdisciplinary research project, based at Durham University and funded by the Wellcome Trust, which aims to provide a better understanding of what it is like to hear a voice that no-one else can hear. Usually associated with severe mental disorders such as schizophrenia, hearing voices is also an important aspect of many ordinary people’s lives. Our project seeks to examine this phenomenon from as many different perspectives as possible. In addition to exploring subjective experiences of voice-hearing, we are investigating there underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms, and the ways in which hearing voices has been interpreted and represented in different cultural, historical and religious contexts.

The first phase of our project was funded by a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award and ran from 2012 to 2015. We have now been fortunate enough to receive a Wellcome Trust Collaborative Award in Humanities and Social Sciences, which will enable us to continue our research into voice-hearing until 2020.

You can read more about the different phases of our research by clicking the buttons below.